End of an Era

America is sick and tired of the Middle East with its unceasing confused warfare, and wants out. President Trump abandoned the Kurds, after leading them to semi-independence, and looked to side when Iran destroyed the Saudi refinery. Living under American hegemony meant no-wars for us for a generation. With America out, and Europe impotent (because of its large Arab minority), the region from the Mediterranean to India is wide open for taking by second-rank powers. Russia, Turkey, Iran are contenders. We in Israel shall have to search for another competent and interested ally/protector. The next five/ten years will be tense for us. We may have to fight the Ayatollahs.  

Dreaming about Narayama Bushiko

The Ballad of the Narayama Mountain, an old Japanese movie. Last night I dreamt that I was sitting in a circle with old women and suddenly realized that I was in the place shown in the movie. The movie is based on a Japanese folk story of a remote village, living on the edge of starvation, where people reaching seventy had "to go to the mountain" to die. Summary from the wiki (with my editing):

The film is set in a small rural village in Japan in the 19th century. According to tradition, once a person reaches the age of 70 he or she must be taken by his son to a remote mountain to die of starvation, a practice known as ubasute. The story concerns Orin, who is 69 and of sound health and good teeth, but notes that a neighbor's son had to drag his father to the mountain, so she resolves to avoid clinging to life beyond her term. She destroys her front teeth so she will not be pitied, she sends her bad daughter-in-law with a present to her family - just when she know that they are going to be lynched (therefore cutting her line's link with the "black" family of the community), and recruits a friend to help her younger son to lose his virginity. The film shows the brutal, desperate life of the villagers, interspersed with beautiful vignettes of nature – birds, snakes, and other animals hunting, watching, singing, copulating or giving birth. 

Sailer cracked the Depopulation Enigma a Decade Ago

In occasion of an American election a decade ago, blogger-market researcher Steven Sailer discovered a link between "red" and "blue" States in the parameter of family formation (easy vs difficult). Bloggers, mostly, disregarded this discovery, but I always thought it was very subtle and astute. Now appears another peculiar economic study that links the tendency of young men (in America) to enter the workforce and their prospect to form a family. I never heard of Ariel J Binder but he must be quite smart to notice this correspondence.

Binder argues that changes in the labor market have interacted with changes in another market that values male employment—the marriage market—and that such interaction provides a more complete explanation of the data. ...Noncollege men experienced a tremendous decline in marriage propensities at the same time that they withdrew from the workforce....  

In addition to reducing marriage formation, this paper argues that these changes reduced the value a stably-employed noncollege man could extract from the marriage market. As a consequence, such men stood to gain less in 2015 from investing time in employment than they did in 1965.

If I understand the last paragraph, he is implying that young people accepts employment (becoming a regular working bloke) for the trade-off of having a steady woman in the bed and the kitchen. The mirror of this verity is that women do not consent going steady with a man without a regular employment. What has changed between 1965 and today that caused men to drop out? Binder says that the social and economic position of women has improved so radically that also their expectations/demands from a potential marriage candidate have increased to the point of disheartening the men.

I could add, to the point of depressing generations and causing an epidemy of addiction and suicide. And the dramatic fall in birth rates.

The solution to Western existential survival is knocking down women from their exalted, legally untouchable, economically privileged perch. To end with an Israeli note: females should pray in a segregated area in the synagogue and the Kotel (pic from the wiki). The coming elections will decide if that separation curtain will fall or erected higher. 

Incredibly Stupid Scholarship on Israel

I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation—not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. From: “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” Social Text 75, Spring 2003, pp. 49-74

I keep reading academic papers on the phenomenon of Israel and keep being amazed and awed  (from awful) by their stupidity. First of all, they all describe the Mizrahi (Arabic speaking) Jews in the Muslim world as living in a paradise, and wonder at the historical fact that one day the all left their thousand years old existence and moved in mass to Israel. This voluntary population transfer is inexplicable and anomalous for Western academics, and they attribute it to Western colonial practice of recruiting manpower in the Third World, almost like the cotton planters in American South importing African slaves. Developing this imaginary parallel, they search for the smallest grievances of the Mizrahi in Israel, something that could be compared to the Civil Rights and so protest movements in America. As they say in German, if you only have a hammer (the AfroAmerican protest movement), then everything looks like a nail. Incredibly for this old Israeli, even the "boureka" (popular) movie of the fifties, Sallah Shabati, is being dismembered and misunderstood to prove their thesis and accidentally (or not) to provoke social divisions in Israel. The element Western academics lack and they don't even know it, is belief in God and the Torah, which explains all the Jewish experience. Without God, the Yemeni Jewish community starting to walk through enemy Saudi desert towards the embattled Promised Land, an event that did really happen, is amazing and inexplicable.

Apparently the Academia cannot digest that Zionism is proved right and Israel is a prosperous and powerful state in this Middle East swamp of failed states and savagery. I am working now in several projects in all cases hired by the Mizrahi businessmen, who have built fantastic enterprises in Israel. In my daily life, I wonder what these academics, many of them Jews themselves, are seeing and writing about.  My opinion is that they are trying desperately to force Israeli reality into the imaginary pattern of Western colonial academic discourse. It is like a woman trying on fashionable shoes three or four measures smaller than her foot and taking a few steps in front of the shop's mirror. It happens all the time and believe me, it is painful for her and for the observer too.

Dont kill yourself on your enemy's door

It is a Chinese saying: Do not kill yourself in your enemy's door". It appears that it was rather common to take vengeance by killing oneself in front of the hated person's door, so he will be accused of murder. Apropos today I drove near my town's military cemetery, and a group of soldiers just walked out. Sunday morning a boy (soldier) left his home (Sokolov St, a block away from my house) to join his unit that was about to move to the North but he did not arrive. A search was organized and his body was found near the train station. It was only announced that it had not been a criminal or terrorist act: the unsaid conclusion is that he killed himself. They never disclose suicide, to avoid others copying it. Every year dozens of IDF soldiers kill themselves. I don't understand why, because  army discipline here is very mild and deserters get maybe a month or two of prison - spent mostly painting stones in an open camp. Israel enjoys peace these days and there was nothing to fear in the tour in the Northern border. Evolution should have deleted long time ago suicide, the fact that it did not means that we still come with many factory defects.  

Permitting a large cookie factory

This morning I had a meeting with the Ministry engineer in a large cookie factory in Holon. It is 17 km from my home, but the traffic is so bad that it took me two hours in the car. The factory is in a large brute concrete industrial estate, full of workshops and no place to park - everywhere they were loading or unloading cars. The cookie factory is a Bucharan family business, these are Jews that had been cut off from the world for hundreds of years in a Central Asian oasis and they are extremely religious. The walls were decorated with wildly colored pictures of Oriental Jewish saints and thank-you memorials of their generosity. It employs two hundred diverse workers. The cookies are excellent.

I had submitted my proposal about two years ago, but only three months ago received the retainer and started the project. The Government Officers were very angry - everybody was shouting in Russian - but surprisingly, the actual observations were mild and sensible, and only near the end I discovered why the commotion. The Bucharan Haredi suffers from a socio-genetic defect that prevents him from telling a true word, even when it is a palpable, visible, innocent fact, moreover, even when it would be to his own advantage! This character flaw reveals, I guess, an instinctive terror of authorities.  It appears that they had hired some Russian engineer before me and he had submitted untrue data, embarrassing the Ministry people. Then he decided to accept my old proposal, hiding that he wanted me to solve his badly poisoned situation. As always, I designed an elegant, technically correct and doable design and today we met on the site to see how it will be carried out.

After two hours of walking around with drawings in hand, everything was agreed. Because of ignorance and panic, the Bucharan had tied himself into a slipknot and hanged himself. Having established that I am honest as well competent, the Regulator in chief received a cookie box and exited. I waited for a cheque, hoping also to be honored with a cookie, but nothing, so I approached a cute Asiatic girl who was portioning a chocolate cream cake and invited myself.

Calories that this old obese Jew needs not. 

The highest IQ people ever: How they organized their lives?

According to Galton, the highest IQ people ever were the Athenians. Their contemporaries agreed. Athens of Pericles (pic) was the cutting edge of human culture. Athens' alter ego was Sparta, its black twin separated at birth: they measured up each other in a terrible 28 year Peloponnesian war, and Sparta emerged superior.

Spartans were of the Dorian race, tall and slim and Nordic-looking. Originally they lived in four agricultural villages in the high Eurotas river valley when somewhere in the Greek Dark Ages they held an assembly and decided to give up subsistence farming and appropriate the surplus production of the Messenians living on the other side of the mountain. The Messenians were Dorians like themselves, and they were many: 200 to 400 thousand, against Sparta's 10 to 20 thousand. So they carefully organized themselves for this ambitious project.

Each Spartan gave up his land and gold, and they formed themselves in regiments. They stopped eating with their families and established communal messes, each one contributing food. They organized intensive military training, use of weapons and experimented with battle formations. They established the agoge, a comprehensive war school till age twenty when they were recruited into regular regiments. For almost a generation they fought the Messenians, till they conquered them and divided the land among the homoioi (the similars, that is, "pure" Spartans that completed the agoge and had been accepted in a mess as equals).

To maintain the Messenians submissive, they created murderous Cryptic Patrols that systematically culled off the stronger-looking peasants. It was not conceptualized as a dysgenic/dumbing down program of the enslaved population, only as precautionary policing.

Being in campaign most of the time, they got a taste for male love and failed to care for families. Men being away campaigning, the women managed the farm. Eventually, Sparta learnt the business of war so well that conquered whole Greece.

They only neglected to reproduce themselves. There was no way to make young warriors to marry. The commune imposed fines and public shaming, but no children were a-coming. They would not accept non-Spartans, they would not share their wealth and power with strangers. At the peak of their power, no more than 3 or 4 thousand full Spartan citizens were left, lording over a Greece of 5 million.

When Alexander descended from Makedonia, the Spartans could not muster opposition for lackof manpower. Sparta was depopulated and abandoned, it became a tourist attraction, like say Venice today, with its North African gondoliers singing as tour guides.

My conclusion is that high IQ is unsustainable, it is poison. Eugenic societies don't last. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Pericles' open, liberal democracy is superior (*). It is a paradox because rationally, it should not be so, but the fact is that it is so. 
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(*) Note that its "openness" was strictly limited. Athens was an ethnic refuge or sanctuary in the extreme Southern corner of the Greek peninsula, surrounded by Dorian peoples like the Boiotians  that applied a permanent pressure to drive them into the sea. Almost all the Ionians migrated to the isles and to Asia Minor, and only Athens remained as the last Ionic settlement on the mainland. Not less racist than the Spartans, Athenians had a multilayer procedure to establish the genealogy of the ephebes (18 y.o.) applying for military service and full citizenship. Those founded of mixed blood were sold as slaves.